


Come Hell and High Water

by QueSeraAwesome



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Altered Mental States, Artificial Intelligence, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Drowning, Gen, Harm to Children, Of the Halo Spartan III variety
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-14
Updated: 2016-03-14
Packaged: 2018-05-26 18:34:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6250900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueSeraAwesome/pseuds/QueSeraAwesome
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Agent Maine has always let the darkness take him. He knows about going under.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Come Hell and High Water

You are the boy who will one day be the monster with the fishbowl helmet. You are the boy that will be a weapon. You are the boy who will be Agent Maine.

You are the boy who will have his humanity taken from him again and again, to finally lose it in an attempt to gain humanity back.

The wind whips at your hair, sharp and pulling tears out of your eyes. The soldiers are standing with you, you and the other children, parachutes strapped to their backs, at the open plane door on the threshold of the night. They’re telling you to jump. If you want to be a Spartan, jump. If you want to avenge your family, jump.

Your father was a large man with thick blonde hair across the backs of his fingers, the backs of his hands. Your mother had a broad face, broad nose, broad smile, white teeth in the dark of her face. Your parents don’t exist anymore, your parents are plasma and glass on the planet you used to call home not too long ago. Your parents burned.

Look up. There aren’t even any stars, blotted away by thick clouds that roil like the acid in your stomach. There’s nothing in front of you, nothing out there to grab hold of. There sure as hell isn’t anything behind.

“Do it,” the soldier says. “Jump, or you’re out of the program.”

You jump out into the dark and it pulls you under.

 

*

 

You have never been one for talk, even before the aliens stole your life and the Spartan III program found you.

Words are hard in way that is nothing like anything else you have lived through.

Lie down on the operating table and try to remember the last time you spoke, in case they were your last words. They’ve come a long way with the implantation process since the first time, when half the program had been killed or maimed. No one’s died since that first group. Lie back, let the man in scrubs place the mask over your face. Breathe in when he tells you to. You don’t even scrunch your nose at the sweet-sour smell.

“Count backwards from one hundred,” the anesthesiologist says. Looks at you sympathetically. He knows you. “You can just mouth it if you want.”

You get as far as eighty-seven, and then you go under.

 

*

 

Your brothers and sisters are sent off to die, and you are split off. You are excised from the body and sent to elsewhere. To Freelancer. To be their Agent Maine.

Try not to laugh the first time you hear the names of the AI you are meant to receive. Know that you will accept Gamma if he is offered to you, but it is one of those orders that will taste like ash.

You do not know where the ashes of your brothers and sisters are, in Gamma Company. You do not know if they are ash or glass.

 

*

 

Carolina doesn’t let you fall, not really. She kicks you into freefall and you counterbalance, swing through an open window (all windows are open once you’ve been through them). The soldiers run from you and that never fails to feel good.

Catch her. (I guess you can catch York too.) You don’t let her fall either. Taking the bullet is not a decision. It is instinctual and you can’t regret it even when your throat is torn open. She’s screaming and you are not being torn open anymore, she’s there, more Spartan than you ever felt you could be. Moments like this prove it.

Your suit is pumping painkillers into you but your throat is still open to the world, there is still smoke in your throat.

 

You fight because that is what you do. That is what you are for.

 

You’re not sure where Carolina is anymore. You aren’t sure where York is, or the Warthog, and the sound of the Semi is loud and far too close

You go under the wheels, over the guard rail and it’s a relief when you finally, finally, go under.

 

*

 

You wake with a voice in your head, and no voice. It only gets worse from there.

The doctors tell you the scars should heal quickly. Assign you a liquid diet. Sigma asks them how long before they stop hurting, something you would never have asked yourself. They stare at him, his flames reflecting in their eyes and you feel Sigma’s anger as he realizes how shocked they are, to be asked to manage his pain.

When the Director begins to use him to torture the Alpha you vomit together into a sink. When Carolina begins to lose herself in blue light, chasing black armor, you know you can’t catch up, and Sigma soothes you. When CT betrays you all, you burn together. When she dies your head begins to ache. Sigma is frightened and angry and lonely. Wash is confused and too gullible. York and North are suspicious. South is fracturing herself trying to navigate the maze the Counselor has placed her in. Wyoming nods to you in the hallways and they never speak, for all Sigma and Gamma do. You are both of you splintering under the strain, everyone is splinting under the strain and it’s only a matter of time before someone ends up with a gut full of shards.

Sigma holds you close, your pain and his pain and you hurt together. You are a weapon, but never one that has been used with care. You are a weapon, but you have never been wielded by one who could share the pain they put you in.

Sigma’s pain is yours and your brothers are dying, your brothers are screaming somewhere out of sight and this time, _this time_ there is something you can do.

No one will ever be able to pinpoint the exact moment you went under and came up the Meta.

 

*

 

You are We, you are the Meta and you’ve _won_. Washington bleeding before you and some parts of you are sorry about that but you are all of you 1.87 and you are all so close to whole. Delta is home, and 1.87 feels so much better so much more powerful than the 1.48 of before. You are getting close.

The Director refuses to produce the Alpha and you snarl and rage and Washington is speaking and _he’s here_

All of you pieces resonate, a chorus of tuning forks responding to vibrations put out by the ghostly figure running towards you and only Beta doesn’t sing, only Beta is screaming _Wait—_

_he is here he is here he is ripping through you frying you you are not code you are flesh and bone and you were never meant to hold this kind of load your neurons were never meant for this the zero ones ones ones zeros ones of information they cannot decipher and so translate into pain he is here he is here fractured edges kissing inside his skull, sharp edges screeching in an attempt to fit together_

You are not We, not a piece among pieces but there is We and Him (Alpha) and Us and Maine and you are not one person you are two people not 1.87 but _two_ and you can’t scream.

Eons later Agent Washington gets to the EMP. All the lights go out. All the power in the facility shuts down. All of the voices are gone, so sudden. Yawning caverns ache in the spaces they had been, in the places inside You they had carved out of you.

You have time enough to think, before you go out too, that you don’t feel like One. You feel like them, like Sigma did an age ago, you feel like a fraction, .685. The pain and the silence drag you under. You would dive in if you could.

 

*

 

You are singular. You are drive. Echo. You need more. More better. More pieces. Strong.

The world is too big and you are too small. There is too much space, everywhere space above your head and behind your back whichever way you turn and inside you.

 

You know you have lost something, and even if you had a throat, you would not be able to say exactly what it was.

 

You are empty. You are the space where the software should go.

Agent Washington has his own spaces, tries to fill them up firing bitter words into the air. Pay him no mind, he has his own empty space to himself inside of you. He can’t fill that kind of space with words. He can’t fill your empty with sounds strung together, ephemeral.

You need More. Better. You need it _back_. The world is too big and you are too empty, all the power gone. Your fists are not good enough now. You know that now.

 

Everywhere is white and then fighting. This you know. This your body knows, it doesn’t need your brain for this. This your mind knows, the capture unit in hand, the invisibility unit still in your inventory. This you know and there was never a choice in this, she is yours and you feel part of the empty fill up. _Power._

And you are your body again, you are the fight but these soldiers are not. They are not the fight for all they try and you forget. You forget that there are empty spaces inside of you that they don’t have and by the time you realize the warthog’s chain is latched to your chest plate you are already airborne.

 

Watch the white snowbound of the cliff disappear, watch the white sky above you get farther away.

Watch the white snow fall, the ice around you white, The armor on your gloves white.

Hit the water.

 

The impact of the surface barely slows you, dazes you enough you don’t register what is happening. Water pours inside, rising inside your suit from your chest, licking up your sternum. You have been broken open. Remember the one, with the sword, the stab. Water rushes up your chest and into your helmet, and even the old scar tissue of your throat shards under its icy fingers (When was the last time you felt anything against your skin?). Too quick, water splashes up your nose and it burns. Cough against the water pooling under your tongue, too cold to even taste (When was the last time you truly tasted anything?)

If there is anything left of you in there, it’s probably thinking this is okay. Up there, Wash is probably talking still, he is trying to fill his space with words and maybe someone will fill it for him.

You’d hope when the authorities come, they leave you here. You are tired of being brought back and maybe this is what Agent Texas felt like all the time.

It might occur to you, man they called Agent Maine, that you are tired. You’d hope if the Project ever makes it here they will leave you with this water, still and cold and colorless, like the thoughts behind your eyes. A part of you that sounds like Her says, _let it be over_. A part of you that was yesterdays ago says, _I can go home now_. A part of you that was Sigma says, _it is poetic, in a way, don’t you think so Agent Maine?_ Your body chokes and spasms and you try to be quiet, you try to be still, to be small.

 

Shut up, all of you, the part of you that is still You would say. Shut up and let me drown.

 

Yes. If there was any of you left in there, you’d clutch your arms around your chest, pull up your knees, your own strength preventing you from struggling as you choke and sink. There is cold, and space, space all around and inside and water, so cold, so still. You burn and you freeze until that goes too.

Until you are big, and white, and everywhere.

**Author's Note:**

> Creamiceandsugar on tumblr prompted me with "Shut up and Let me Drown."


End file.
